Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Ulterior motives aside, looking at it from the marketing perspective it presents a nice unified package for the big boys. On the golf course the sales drones will have clear tit-for-tat competition with MS's offerings.

So why is this important for the internet? Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet. No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS. With this acquisition, we will have done just that - positioned Sun at the center of the web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the web economy. For startups and web 2.0 companies, to government agencies and traditional enterprises. This creates enormous potential for Sun, for the global free software community, and for our partners and customers across the globe. There's opportunity everywhere.

One can only hope that they will be using this to replace the database that comes in Open Office.

Wouldn't SQLite [sqlite.org] be a better choice for that? MySQL is a bit to heavy for use in an office application. SQLite was designed to be embedded into applications, is quite powerful, fast, and released in the public domain [sqlite.org].

One can only hope that they will be using this to replace the database that comes in Open Office.

You can already use MySQL as the database engine for Open Office.

The development environment in OOo (Base) is a database client, not a database engine. Base does bundle the HSQLDB database engine, but even that is just XML tables, and shouldn't be used for anything serious.

As far as the quality of Base, yep it's rough, but it's also brand new for OOo v2. It's being actively developed, and there are plans [openoffice.org]to use it to allow users to share data from several FOSS packages within the suite.

* Btw, I know you were just trolling, but I thought this was worth an answer, since desktop databases are a badly misunderstood class of software.

Did your program really communicated using MySQL protocol over TCP or unix socket? Is this protocol even documented?Almost all software uses implementation of this protocol from libmysqlclient. Linking to this library. Hence, GPL.

The banks says they want safety and security - and you answer that your database isn't enterprise critical so why pay for Oracle? Management then says, ah well, how about MS SQL Server....

Any database at a bank that's not "enterprise critical" is bound to be less than 4GB in size, or else it would automatically be deemed "enterprise critical". Oracle gives away the XE database for free, but it has a 4GB size limit. I use XE for all kinds of stuff , even some "enterprise critical" applications in my organization where our big databases are the full Oracle Enterprise and Standard versions, but where I need something smaller and to run on separate boxen. The XE database has pretty much the full PL/SQL language support built-in and it's trivial to make over-the-net database links between XE and a big database so I can use simple SQL to remote tables to grab a subset of data from the big database without any cumbersome export/import junk in the middle.

Are you comparing working at google like being a slave in the 1800's? Must be the swimming pool, 5 star restaurant, lounge, roller hockey. I could go on but I think everyone here gets my point and agrees with you 100%

Using protocols to communicate to a program or service is NOT linking!

I understand where you're coming from, which is why I moved to Postgres for all my new applications last year. However, as it stands now, I think MySQL is within their rights to use the GPL for the client. As far as I know, there is no way to communicate with a MySQL server without linking to their client library (i.e., libmysqlclient.a). At one time there was an attempt to maintain a fork of the old LGPL MySQL 3, but it never took off. Now, merely linking to the client library doesn't automatically create a derived worked (see Linus's explanation [lkml.org]), however, in the absence of some other compatible library you could have linked with instead, it's pretty much impossible to say your linked program is independent of MySQL. And since independence is a requirement to have a non-derived work (i.e. the ability for a program to live a separate life, do something useful without the linked library), the program ends up being derived from the MySQL client, and has to abide by the GPL.
There is still plenty of argument around this topic, but again, it can be avoided by using Postgres, which IMHO is a better database anyway.

Another advantage of PostgreSQL is that it's SQL syntax is 95% or more compatible with Oracle's.

I am using QT4/C++ with PostgreSQL/Oracle. The source uses compiler defines to select the relevant database and to make appropriate changes in syntax for things like nested CODE/DECODE, etc. It can compile unchanged on either Linux or Windows and runs the same way on both, with identical look & feel. I use MS VS 2003 on Windows and QDevelop or Kate on Linux.

IMO, for all light to medium (and some heavy) applications PostgreSQL is more than adequate. It is a LOT easier to maintain and is auto-tuning. It's license precludes any corporation from buy out PostgreSQL and taking control of it, although corporations can utilize it with their proprietary extensions to make a specialized product.

Reid agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions (called "time bombs") that would deactivate freely copied versions of the program after a 90-day expiration date. To avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb feature.

We added triggers, stored procedures, and views in 5.0. Today there are publicly several transactional engines (supported by companies like Oracle, IBM, Solid, and yes ourselves). There are many other non-public transactional engines.

There are many of us who have been working on MySQL for many years (my efforts with MySQL begin a decade ago). None of us are willing to move away from our open source roots. I've seen nothing that makes me think that Sun had any interest in doing anything foolish. They understand the value of MySQL being open source.

MySQL dropped BerkeleyDB support back in version 5.1.12 (24 October 2006) [mysql.com]. MyISAM is still the default engine [mysql.com], and for many common applications is still a good choice. They are exposed long-term over the InnoDB purchase, but only for transactional apps, and there are several good candidates available [mysql.com] that might replace it. Oracle are in no hurry to bury a major revenue source until the strategic advantages of doing so outweigh the short-term benefits of selling InnoDB into companies that wouldn't have bought Oracle anyway.

Granted, I'm not using SQLite to do anything complicated - mostly just as dumb storage for non-huge cross-linked lists but it still seems remarkably capable, very fast and very low on resources, with the GUI providing a nice interface for a quick gander at the data structure.

The truth is:Sun can't possibly screw around more than MySQL AB has been doing ever since they went IPO. Just the other day I looked for MySQL Workbench - expecting it to be delayed yet another 2 years. Only to discover something worse: A beta is out and they've written in in DOt-f*cking-NET! Can you believe it? They've rewritten MySQLs core selling argument to many people in a prorpietary plattform that is owned by MS. MySQLs core design tool only runs on MS 2k SP4 and above! Unbelievable.Suns marketing is just as shoddy as that of MySQL, so that's a perfect fit. But I sure do hope Sun will bring back some technical oper-source superiority to MySQL, which it once shared with many mature OSS projects.

1. Completely free for embedding (the embedded version of MySQL has license fees, AFAIK).2. Easier to move databases between machines (they're endian-neutral, monolithic files).3. Supports more of SQL92.4. Far lighter in terms of resource consumption.

I'm sure there's plenty of other reasons, but for a certain subset of problem domains, SQLite is an *excellent* solution, IMHO.

'course, that's not to say it's perfect. It has a quirky typing system, and it's locking is extremely rudimentary. But for your average Access user, it's probably more than sufficient as a data storage engine.